‘I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
The inspection robot shunted itself into another branch of the pipe, just like the one where Quirrenbach had found it back on the surface. The hammering of the suction pads slowed, quietened and stopped, the machine ticking quietly to itself. We were in complete darkness and silence except for distant, thunder-like sounds of superheated steam roaring through remote parts of the pipe network. I touched the hot metal of the pipe with the tip of my finger and felt the faintest of tremors. I hoped that it didn’t mean there was a wall of scalding, thousand- atmosphere steam slamming towards us.
‘It’s still not too late to turn back,’ Quirrenbach said.
‘Where’s your sense of curiosity?’ I said, feeling like Sky Haussmann goading Norquinco forwards.
‘About eight kilometres above us, I think.’
That was when someone slid back a panel on the side of the pipe and looked at all three of us as if we were a consignment of excrement someone had sent down from Chasm City.
‘I know you,’ the man said, nodding at Quirrenbach. Then he nodded once at me and once at Zebra. ‘I don’t know you. And I certainly don’t know you.’
‘And I don’t know you from shit,’ I said, getting my own word in before the man who had opened the pipe could get the edge over me. I was already heaving myself out of the robot, relishing the chance to stretch my legs for the first time in hours. ‘Now show me where I can get a drink.’
‘Who are you?’
‘The man asking you for a fucking drink. What’s wrong? Did someone seal up your ears with pig shit?’
He seemed to get the message. I’d gambled that the man wouldn’t be a major player in whatever operation was going on down here and that a large part of his job description would consist of taking abuse from visiting thugs a little higher up the food chain.
‘Hey, no offence, man.’
‘Ratko, this is Tanner Mirabel,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘And this is… Zebra. I phoned through to say we were on our way down to see Gideon.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And if you didn’t get the message, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.’
Quirrenbach appeared impressed enough to want to join in. ‘That’s fucking right. And get the fucking man the… get the man the fucking drink he asked for.’ He wiped a sleeve across his parched lips. ‘And get me one too, Ratko, you, er, fucking little cocksucker.’
‘Cocksucker? That’s good, Quirrenbach. Really good.’ The man patted him on the back. ‘Keep on taking the assertiveness lessons — they’re really paying off.’ Then he looked at me with what was almost an expression of sympathy, a professional-to-professional thing. ‘All right. Follow me.’
We followed Ratko out of the pipe room. His expression was difficult to read, since his eyes were hidden behind grey goggles sprouting various delicate sensory devices. He wore a coat patterned like Vadim’s, but of shorter cut, its patches a little less rough and more lustrous.
‘So, friends,’ Ratko said. ‘What brings you down here?’
‘Call it a quality inspection,’ I said.
‘No one’s complaining about quality that I hear of.’
‘Then maybe you haven’t been listening too well,’ Zebra said. ‘The shit’s getting harder and harder to track down.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really,’ I said. ‘It’s not just the Fuel shortage. There’s a problem with purity. Zebra and I supply Fuel to a portfolio of clients all the way up to the Rust Belt. And we’re getting complaints. ’ I tried to sound menacingly reasonable. ‘Now — that could mean a problem somewhere in the chain of supply between here and the Belt — there are a lot of weak links in that chain, and believe me, I’m investigating them all. But it could also mean the basic product is getting degraded. Cut, watered, whatever you want to call it. That’s why we’re making this a personal visit, with Mister Quirrenbach’s assistance. We need to see that there’s still such a thing as high-quality Dream Fuel being manufactured in the first place. If there isn’t, someone’s been lying to someone else and there’s going to be more shit hitting the fan than in a Force Ten shitstorm. Either way, it’s bad news for someone.’
‘Hey, listen,’ Ratko said, holding up his hands. ‘Everyone knows there are problems at source level. But only Gideon can help you with the why.’
I threw out a line. ‘I hear he enjoys his privacy.’
‘He doesn’t have much choice, does he?’
I laughed, trying to make it sound as convincing as possible, without understanding what I was laughing at. But the way the man with the goggles had said it, he obviously thought he had made a joke of some kind.
‘No, I guess not.’ I changed the tone of my voice, now that he and I had established some shaky grounds for mutual respect. ‘Well, let’s put our relationship on a more friendly footing, shall we? You can put my doubts about the immediate quality of the product to rest by providing me with — how shall we say — a small commercial sample?’
‘What’s wrong?’ Ratko said, reaching into his coat and handing me a small, dark-red vial. ‘Got high on your own supply once too often?’
I took the vial, Zebra passing me her wedding-gun. I knew I had to do it; that only Fuel would enable me to unlock the final secrets of my past.
‘You know how it is,’ I said.
Sky and Norquinco pushed onwards, always keeping a wary eye on the inertial compasses. The shaft branched and twisted, but the head-up displays on their helmets always showed their positions relative to the shuttle, together with the route they had so far followed, so there was no real possibility of getting lost, even if they might encounter obstructions on the way out. The route they had taken led more or less to the middle of the ship, and now they were heading roughly forward, towards where the command sphere should be. They had been carrying on for perhaps five minutes when there was another bell-like reverberation, as if the entire hull had been struck like a gong. It seemed fractionally stronger this time.
‘That’s it,’ Norquinco said. ‘Now we’re going back.’
‘No, we’re not. We lost the line already, and we already have to cut ourselves out. Now it just means we have some more to cut through.’
Reluctantly now, Norquinco followed him. But something was changing. Their suit sensors were beginning to pick up traces of nitrogen and oxygen instead of hard vacuum. It was as if air were slowly building up inside the shaft; as if the two clangs they had heard had been part of some immense alien airlock.
‘There’s light ahead,’ Sky said when the air pressure had reached one atmosphere and begun climbing beyond it.
‘Light?’
‘Sickly yellow light. I’m not imagining it. It’s like it’s coming from the walls themselves.’
He turned off his torch light, ordering Norquinco to do likewise. For a moment they were in near darkness. Sky shivered, feeling again the old, never-entirely-vanquished terror of darkness which the nursery had instilled in him. But then his eyes began to adjust to the ambient illumination and it was almost as if they still had the torches on. Better, in fact, for the pale yellow light reached far ahead of them, revealing the tract of the tunnel for tens of metres.
‘Sky? There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I suddenly feel like I’m crawling downhill.’
He wanted to laugh; wanted to put Norquinco down, but he felt it too. Something was definitely pressing his body against one side of the shaft. It was soft now, but as he crawled further (and now it really was a kind of crawling), it increased in strength, until he felt almost as if he was back aboard the Santiago, with her spin- generated artificial gravity. But the alien ship had been neither spinning nor accelerating.
‘Gomez?’
The answer, when it came, was incredibly faint. ‘Yes. Where are you?’
‘Deep. We’re somewhere near the command sphere.’
